Backlogs

Dec 15th 2010

This is the season when people gather in the streets their gossip turns to holiday cheer between puffs of smoke or icy breath. Snow falls lazily and steady. Hinuet, as the native peoples of the north like to say, drifting, settles white over dingy cityscape. Winter has come. And with it, the hurley-burley of anticipation. Schools prepare for break as students prepare for examinations. Mothers and Fathers search shelves and kiosks for gifts. Children, red-nosed cold troumping through the school grounds; a flurry of activity - snowballs flung and flinging. Soon, the calendars will flip forward to a new year and people will forget the merriment of the season. With gifts gotten and snow fallen Winter will continue cold and bittersweet. Eventually Spring will come slowly like a great tilting weight. All the while utterances in frozen breath dangle - puffy clouds of curses on the cold and snow and wind. Sooner still Winter's chiding forgot as Summer is made out of Spring. Unbearable heat and noise and the price of petrol these days! Can you believe it's going to rain? The kids will play in the hot, weedy air blistful. Those of us, charged with age, squirm and sweat in the languishing days of August. Suddenly the wind refreshes too much; it harks of chill. Stalks of corn grow amber in the setting sun.

Where does the time go? Looking back can we see the deeds of Winter last? No great impact do the seasons have to us remembered - none not righted by work of men. Then, do the seasons' passing impress upon us at all? What works of grandeur did Summer leave last Fall?

There is a tree nearby. See it now: a tall, burly thing. Its trunk is ashen - almost dark not quite brown. Its branches are fingers stabbing open palms at gray cloud and sky - all its leafs long since fallen. In the snow it hides before your eyes - colored muted night. Unremarkable thing. Be still and watch close now: from simple seed to tree and sapling inbetween; Tiny leafs prod up through Spring's soft mud. A weed at first then a yearling. Now it is shooting high a great bouffant of verdant green - cool shadows in Summer sun. Foliage colored brightly orange and yellow-brown paint the winds of Autumn. Now, grown and weathered, steeped in snow this tree still creeps its longing branches out and higher. Or perhaps it slumbers hinuet all around.